


Take comfort from the fact that I shall suffer

by SSock



Category: Merchant of Venice - Shakespeare
Genre: F/M, Period-Typical Anti-Semitism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 01:48:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8948791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SSock/pseuds/SSock
Summary: Shylock/Leah backstory.
The title is a quote from Hated Nightfall.





	

She first noticed him through a half-open door in her parents’ house. He was seated at the table, winding a strand of pearls through his fingers and talking to her father, some babble bordering on obscene that seemed more for his own amusement than his listener’s. The pearls were a gift for her.

Of course she knew him - knew of him. He was too strange - and not quietly - to not recognize his red head and odd manners, which made him seem more like an ugly caricature than a man. The hair was real, but she found later the rest was his affectation, either from a perverse sense of amusement at his own looks or some long-simmering anger. And she’d known he was unmarried and near enough her age, but she’d never seriously thought of him. As soon marry a stage villain in a false nose and wig. But (perhaps out of desperation) her parents had thought of him seriously, it seemed. And so had he.

Or he’d been bored and looked for someone new to torment. During subsequent conversations he’d suggested that she’d prefer to marry her sister’s betrothed, insisted her eyes were bad, told an offensive and as far as she could tell entirely pointless story about David and Bathsheba, and all but said straight out that after they married - before she’d agreed that they would be married - he’d happily sell her favors to the highest bidder. She’d have been angry if she hadn't been confused. And then she’d caught him watching her with a sharp, guilty, childish look, and suddenly decided, “As well him as any other.”

And then he’d asked her father for help with a legal case and she’d found him one day sitting in her father’s study with his head in his hands, looking tired and preoccupied and for once like a real person and she decided, “Better him than the others.” She gave him a ring that wasn’t worth the gifts he’d given her, though from his face he felt it was.

Then he disappeared for nearly two weeks, until she finally sought him out herself. 

“A fortnight?” he said. “Has it been a fortnight? I think, since figuring is important to my one business, which is to say the business of money, and nights to my other business, which is to say the business of marriage, then figuring the nights I think it has not been-”

“Stop.” 

He pressed his lips together and blinked at her.

“Stop - you are _ridiculous_ \- You crouch and you fawn and you babble, and you peer at people from the corner of your eye and fondle your money. You act insane.”

“I am insane.”

“You act like a character in a play.”

“Sometimes,” he said, and he looked like someone else completely, “I think I am that too.”

“You make people hate you.”

He laughed shortly. “I could act like one of their dear saints and they’d hate me.”

“Not those people,” she said. “Your own people, who wouldn’t if you were better.”

“I care not.”

“They draw back from you in the streets because they fear what you’ll bring down on our heads. You make them think of mobs.”

“I care not,” he said again.

“Then you should be whipped until you do care!” she said.

He hesitated. “And who would do that, if they all fear me so?”

“I would,” she snapped. “If there was no one else -” and stopped abruptly.

He put his hand to his mouth and looked at her, wide-eyed. He was wearing her ring.

“Go home, Leah,” he said. “I’ll follow directly.”


End file.
